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Passport for Care

Passport For CareSM (PFC) is an innovative healthcare project developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Cancer Center that addresses the need to provide patients and survivors of chronic illnesses with increased access to their medical information and healthcare guidelines. The PFC is an interactive Internet resource that provides the user accurate, timely and individualized healthcare information on a "just-in-time" basis. The Passport For Care initially is being developed for survivors of childhood cancer. Once completed and evaluated, it will be extended to encompass the millions of adult cancer survivors nationwide. It is anticipated that eventually the PFC could evolve into Passports that would address the needs of individuals with a wide range of medical conditions.

The PFC is an interactive Internet resource that addresses the need for accurate and timely healthcare information for long-term survivors of childhood cancer. The PFC website has been designed to contain the following elements:

A Guidelines Generator that dynamically assembles recommendations for care individualized to each survivor according to his or her treatment history. The recommendations, are based upon the recently developed COG Late Effects Screening Guidelines.

An end-of-treatment summary Care Summary, completed by the treating institution, and available to the survivor, that can be securely shared with providers at the direction of the survivor. This Care Summary is used to generate the individualized recommendations for each survivor.

Individualized survivor education resources that are customized to the needs of each patient based on their disease and its treatment. These are readily accessible to the survivor and their healthcare provider(s). The information provided helps empower the survivor and is designed to facilitate both survivor and provider follow-up compliance.

System Security features that ensure privacy and confidentiality.

The goal of this project is to develop a national resource that will serve as the model for meeting the needs of cancer survivors. The PFC was successfully implemented in the in the Long-Term Survivor Clinic at the Texas Children's Cancer Center in November, 2007 and has been used with more than 300 patients to provide care summaries and guidelines to practitioners in the clinic. The initial implementation was under an institutional review board approved feasibility study.